During her address to journalists, the First Minister’s well-honed rhetorical abilities cast their usual spell — broken only during the Q&A, when she was asked about her legacy of a collapsing NHS, widening attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy in schools, and soaring numbers of drug deaths every year. Before that, though, we were firmly in Sturgeonland, where — a bit like being on a Highland distillery tour — reality tends to disappear in a euphoric haze and temporarily everything looks better than it actually is.

Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago  —  she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a lightning rod for “irrationality” in the “tone and tenor of discourse” on controversial areas, and expressed the fervent desire that things be less polarised from now on.

All of this must have been quite enraging for one of the few actually talented individuals left in the SNP, Joanna Cherry. Cherry is well-known for disagreeing with the party line on gender law reform in favour of self-identification, arguing that it will harm women’s and lesbians’ rights. In 2021, on the same day that an SNP supporter sent her violent sexualised threats for which he was later convicted, Cherry was sacked from her Westminster front-bench role, apparently for her opposition to self-ID. You don’t get much more “intensity” and “brutality” in politics than that.

Equally, Sturgeon’s new turn as a pacifist in the culture wars must have been hard for Joan McAlpine to hear. She was a highly successful MSP for a decade, but was viciously ostracised in 2019 for expressing reservations about the conflation of sex and gender identity in the Scottish Census. She was eventually pushed out of politics via a gerrymandered party rule change that some suspected was deliberately designed to oust her.

Sturgeon did nothing at the time to reduce toxicity in the party with respect to Cherry and McAlpine, even when SNP MPs were openly describing the pair as hateful for views about self-ID which — it now turns out — most of the Scottish population share. Quite the contrary: she frequently turned the heat up, via the regular delivery of public statements of support for transactivist causes that could easily be read as green lights for others to carry on smearing. Right up until the moment a fortnight ago when the First Minister was left havering on ITV about whether Isla Bryson is or is not a woman, she tended to present any dissent towards the “trans women are women” mantra as the product of confused or malicious thinking. When a headteacher publicly sides with the school bullies, she might as well have declared open season on their victims.

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It was also Sturgeon’s government that funded one of the main engines of transactivist insanity in Scotland and the UK more generally, the Scottish Trans Alliance (now Scottish Trans). Effectively, they paid this organisation and its parent charity, Equality Network, to tell them what to think on trans issues, and then obediently did exactly what they were told — including pushing for self-ID, and dismissing all objections to it as hateful.

In 2016, then-director James Morton told the Women and Equalities Select Committee that rape crisis and domestic violence services for women should admit males self-identifying as women, and should work to “educate” any traumatised female service-users who complained — a point that was uncritically incorporated into committee’s final report. And in 2018, Morton wrote about how his government-funded organisation had deliberately influenced the Scottish Prison Service to introduce males into female prisons, reasoning that introducing self-ID in these “very challenging circumstances” would put pressure on other public services to adopt it too. And — factually at least, though not ethically — he was right.

So, for Sturgeon to pose at the press conference on Wednesday as some kind of throwback to the Scottish Enlightenment, urging that “debates should be rational” and that “Scotland should be capable of having them”, may well count as the most brass-necked reverse ferret of her long career. She is certainly no Thomas Reid or Dugald Stewart, two 18th-century philosophers closely associated with the Scottish school of common-sense realism, and who each emphasised the importance of trusting one’s senses and guarding against paradox. For the policy of self-ID is manifestly a failure on both counts.

Never mind that — despite an apparently shared interest in witch-burning, Sturgeon doesn’t even reach the fairly low bar for public rationality set by Presbyterian founder and general miserabilist John Knox. Knox may have been fond of ducking-stools, stocks, and pillories, but at least he thought that people should interpret biblical texts for themselves, without the interposition of priests in funny robes spouting incomprehensible jargon.

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Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon

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Partly thanks to Knox and the high levels of literacy he encouraged in schoolchildren for Bible-reading purposes, Scottish culture has a long and justly famed tradition of valuing independent thinking. There is a rejection of closed hierarchies of power, and a habit of nose-thumbing authority figures. Outward appearances of prestige are supposed to mean little, and the lowliest and poorest member of society is thought equal to the most powerful and well-connected. “A man’s a man for a’ that,” Robert Burns famously told us. “Trans women are women,” piped the incongruent refrain from Sturgeon. To prove it, she put violent, unstable murderers and paedophiles into close living arrangements with impoverished, abused females. And then she left them to get on with it.

Politicians are generally good at rewriting history. In the general Great Forgetting which, I assume, will follow the eventual Great Resetting on gender policies towards something more sensible, the SNP may well feign collective amnesia about their former glorious leader’s role in helping discourse in Scotland on trans matters become as vicious and divided as it could possibly be. For all I know, Sturgeon might be about to announce her appointment as a Visiting Professor of Public Reason at Strathclyde Uni, or something. Stranger things have happened. So just in case — and as the woman herself might say — let me be very clear.

Over the course of her leadership, Sturgeon has presided over a closed system of mutual backscratching between her government and favoured courtier-transactivists, paying them to tell her and her government what to think. She has helped shut down free and lawful public discussion of their demands, enabled the unjust monstering of their critics, and sat silently watching as eminently capable women in her own party suffer unconscionable bullying and smearing from others within the party for dissenting.

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Scottish nationalism is fuelled by resentment

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Even worse, while posing as both feminist and socialist, she monomaniacally has put the vested interests of a small group of privileged, university-educated activists over the interests of huge swathes of ordinary Scottish women, including many who are vulnerable and traumatised by violence and sexual abuse. And she has apparently done this for what she foolishly believed would be political gain.

Nicola Sturgeon may well be — in fact, obviously is — a human being. But she’s a hypocritical and callous one. She’s right to say that Scottish politics has become more intense and brutal, but she only has herself to blame.

“We were brought up to keep our mouths shut. ‘You’ll get into trouble for your tongue’ — that’s what people said to us children all the time. We went through life afraid to talk. Mama used to say that every other person was an informer. We were afraid of our neighbours, and especially of the police … Even today, if I see a policeman, I begin to shake with fear.”

Decades from now, will a Scotsman brought up in Edinburgh or Glasgow offer a similar testimony to historians documenting our era? The question is by no means absurd, not in light of the Hate Crimes and Public Order Bill brought forth by the ruling Scottish National Party. In testimony before a parliamentary committee this week, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said that he believes the reach of the proposed law should cover words spoken in the privacy of people’s homes.

If this were to become law, parents would learn to fear their children, trained in schools in the rigid catechism of “social justice” orthodoxies. And not only reading the Bible or the Koran to one’s children, but simply owning one could land a Scotsman in the dock on charges of “possessing inflammatory materials”. J.K. Rowling would in principle stand to be imprisoned simply for having stood up for biological women in the face of transgender militants — and her Left-wing political convictions would not spare her.

The proposed bill has drawn harsh criticism from across the Scots political spectrum, such that it is all but unthinkable that it would become law. A poll this past summer found that over two-thirds of Scots voters oppose the law  — yet the Scots Parliament last month voted down a Conservative attempt to table the legislation entirely. Clearly this legislation matters to the government, and those who oppose it risk being tarred as bigots.

Even if the hate crimes bill does not become law, the fact that legislation so shockingly illiberal has come this far is a very dark sign of the times. The bill is yet another instance of “soft totalitarianism” marching through the institutions of Western liberal democracies, rewriting  laws, regulations and social codes according to a therapeutic rationale: to make life “safer” for racial, sexual and religious minorities.

What is soft totalitarianism? Five years ago, émigrés from the Soviet bloc began telling me that they were seeing emerge in the West the same kinds of things they once fled from in the communist East. This initially struck me as alarmist, but the more I talked with them, the more I came to understand they were right.

What are they seeing? Broadly speaking, the rise of ideological Left-wing hegemony within institutions — especially academia, where many of them work — and the stifling of free speech and free thought by a punitive regime of censorship.

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For example, a Cambridge don told me that the eagerness by many on the political and cultural Left to police expression, and to stop at nothing — even telling lies — to ruin the reputations of those they identify as enemies of the people is one primary manifestation. The 2019 scandal in which a journalist from the New Statesman twisted quotes from Sir Roger Scruton in a briefly successful effort to ruin him is but one example.

They also see the Left’s categorisation of people according to the standards of identity politics, and judging them based on those categories, as a replay of Marxist totalitarianism. In the Soviet bloc, your social class determined your status and your fate. You were not judged on the basis of your individual character and actions, but rather as a representative of your class. In our time, social class has given way to racial, sexual and other forms of identity.

There are other facets, but the core of it is the total politicisation of all aspects of life — even, as we now see in the Scots case, life inside the home. This is the essence of totalitarianism. Authoritarianism is a condition in which political life is controlled by a single leader or party, but people are more or less free otherwise. Totalitarianism is an extreme form of authoritarianism, in which all of life is considered to be political. The authoritarian only wants your political obedience — but the totalitarian wants your soul.

A society in which family members have to fear each other, and in which people are not free to say what they think even inside their own homes, is totalitarian, even if it does not have secret police and gulags. I have called this new totalitarianism “soft” primarily because it presents itself in therapeutic terms — as motivated by caring for victims of society’s prejudices. The cultural critic James Poulos predicts the coming of the “Pink Police State”: a polity in which people will willingly trade political liberties for guarantees of personal pleasure and security.

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First, unlike the hard totalitarianism of the Cold War, and of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, this new threat to liberty does not depend on inflicting pain and terror, but rather, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the managing of comfort, pleasure and entertainment. The fact that this soft totalitarianism doesn’t look like Orwell’s dystopia makes it hard for us to see it for what it is. In fact, a college literature professor told me that when he teaches Brave New World, few of his students recognise it as a dystopia at all.

Second, in the United States, soft totalitarianism is not chiefly manifesting through actions of the state, but through policies of civil society institutions: universities, corporations, news and entertainment media, and others. This is another reason to think of it as soft, though after I posted something about the Scots hate crimes bill on my blog, a Czech émigré friend emailed to ask, “Would you still define this — prosecuting people for private speech — as ‘soft,’ or is it firming up a bit?”

True, the velvet glove over the iron fist is bound to wear thin, especially in Britain, which does not have the constitutional protections afforded by the American First Amendment. But the ethos of soft totalitarianism is growing ever more powerful within the private sector. If a society internalises the ruling ideology, whether out of fear of prosecution or persecution, or because people come to understand that dissenters will remain economically and socially marginalised, the controllers have less need to criminalise dissent.

Those who lived under Soviet-bloc communism are convinced that we in the West are going to surrender to soft totalitarianism, because we lack natural defences against it. The Scots hate crimes bill is a bright red line. When I was in the former Soviet bloc interviewing ex-dissidents about how we in the West should prepare to resist, Kamila Bendova, who worked with her late husband Vaclav Benda in the Charter 77 leadership, strongly warned against surrendering privacy, especially inside one’s home.

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In her Prague apartment, where she and her husband held dissident meetings, and counseled people on their way to the secret police headquarters down the street for questioning, Bendova said she could not understand why so many people today are willing to surrender their privacy for consumer convenience (via smartphones, Alexa smart speakers and the like). She pointed to the scars on the walls where, after communism’s fall, she and her husband had ripped out the wires the secret police had installed to bug their flat.

To stay free to speak the truth, she said, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. “Information means power,” Bendova told me. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

The Scots Parliament has the power to prevent Hamza Yousaf from becoming a commissar whose Pink Police State writ extends even into the intimacy of homes and families. Will it? One could not have imagined that such a question would ever be asked in Britain. But then, 2020 has revealed much about who and what we have become.

Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies is published by Penguin Random House

They are offset by free university places for many Scots students, free prescriptions and free home care for those assessed as requiring it. But these are now straining the budget. The Scots Auditor General judged the nation’s health as “poor” and the free university places have the perverse effect of helping those students who need help least — from middle class and well-to-do families — more than the poor.

The book would be — is — not long, at a little over 200 pages; and dislike of the nationalists’ determination to destroy the United Kingdom — my country — was warm enough to propel me through the weeks and months of writing.

I had not counted on the intervention of emotion. Grappling with the evident desire of fellow Scots — near half — to leave the UK, was to open the mind to occasional doubt prompted by nationalists’ claims which, at times, seemed rational. It was to discover that most English said they would regret Scotland going — but were clearly not deeply concerned by it. Scotland weighs upon the English mind much, much less than vice versa. Naturally.

There was even a small voice, in the mish-mash of thoughts and plans, which whispered: “traitor!”. So powerful has been nationalist propaganda, and so enclosed in Scottishness was my upbringing (as most others of my generation) that to take a hostile stance to those who spoke in Scotland’s name was to occasionally make me look at myself askance. It passed, however.

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Most of all, the exercise let loose a hundred tributaries of memory. Growing up in the fifties and sixties in a small fishing town — Anstruther, on the East Fife coast — was to live among competing shards of “Scottishness” and “Englishness”, which partly structured the young lives of my generation.

“Americanness” was in there too, coming out of the juke box in Eddie Clarke’s café, where the upper streams of the local comprehensive went after school, to buy cigarettes in ones and twos and blow the smoke down a straw into the Coke, in the hope that, as one of our number maintained, you could get high on the resulting mixture.

This was no nationalist enclave. East Fife had been Liberal in the late nineteenth century, though the MPs badged themselves “Liberal Unionist” in the early twentieth. When it passed to the Conservatives, they too put “Unionist” in their election literature, to underscore their support for the Crown, and for Northern Ireland. Distrust of Catholicism was strong, in these Presbyterian and nonconformist fishing towns.

The Liberal party came back in 1987, in the form of Menzies Campbell — who held it till his retirement in 2015, when it was taken by the nationalists. Stephen Gethins was a bright, diligent politician, who had a 4000-plus majority in 2015; and in 2017, hung on with a majority of two: the most marginal in Britain. In December, he lost, Wendy Chamberlain taking it back for the Liberal Democrats with a majority of over 1300.

It was the only seat the Nationalists lost in 2019, and the shame of it was that Gethins was one of the party’s better MPs. But the area, it seemed to me from conversations there, had been only reluctantly nationalist, upset by the constant calls for a second referendum, tending still to the Union. It didn’t take to Boris Johnson, and saw the unflashy Liberals, and the former police officer Chamberlain, as more expressive of its own political nature.

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The secondary school in Anstruther took in children from the other small towns on the East Fife Coast, and inland. A comprehensive before the great expansion of such schools — the area was too thinly populated to have a separate grammar and a secondary modern — it was strictly streamed according to performance in the 11+ exam, from ‘A’ through B C D and E to ‘PR’ (for practical). Its headmaster strove to stress the distinctions: ‘A’ stream boys played rugby, others football: ‘A’ stream boys and girls came in to Anstruther by train, others by bus. Class distinctions were small in a little town where hard, sometimes perilous, manual work provided its main living; but the headmaster, when I was at school, was diligent in creating as much of an elite as the traffic would bear.

Most of the boys went to the fishing, or farming, and left at 15; those of us who remained, with King Lear and trigonometry, produced the ten or so who went to universities. A group of us, all boys, took to speaking cod-Shakespeare – “I trust I see your grace in good health?” When passing the school garden, whose care was the work of the PR class, we might say – “Fie upon it, fie: ‘tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed”.

Some of the kids from the thin layer of professionals — lawyers, bankers, doctors — went private; a few came to our school, but it was overwhelmingly working and lower middle class. Of my Shakespearean comrades, one had a father often unwell, a mother who worked on the telephone switchboard; the other from a family of the strict Plymouth Brethren sect (thus forbidden from watching or even listening to the plays he loved, and from which he could quote long passages), whose father was a carpenter.

My mother — she had left my (English) father before my birth — was a beautician, whose beauty parlour was in the back room of my grandparents’ house, where we lived, which bloomed into a small shop. We all spoke Scots at home and in the street, but for we intellectuals, it was already thinning out, confined to such as cannae and winnae and dinnae (can’t, won’t, don’t). We knew we were going to speak “proper” English. The Scots we often put in virtual inverted commas to show our superiority, as over the wise saws of common sense — as whit’s fur ye’ll no’ gang past ye or monny a mickle maks a muckle. Unsurprisingly, we were  widely thought to be pains in the neck and, in the way of Scots villages, told so.

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My grandfather, a retired merchant seaman who had served on one of the great imperial lines, was strongly Conservative-imperialist — but scornful of the English, seeing his apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards before his merchant service as an entry into the very heart — lost — of Scots craft excellence: “mair ships built in a year,” he would say, accurately, “than the rest o’ the world combined!” This was craft pride seamlessly joined to Scots pride: quite separate from any nationalism, which he saw as demented (as did most Scots, then).

There were two outstanding exceptions. One was James Braid, the long-serving provost (mayor) of St Monans, along the coast from Anstruther, who was an enthusiastic member of the SNP, main organiser of the annual celebration at Bannockburn: he was mocked, but popular — in large part because of his conscientiousness as provost. When he stood, as he did often, in the general election on the nationalist ticket, he got a good show, usually third behind the Tories and the Liberals, in front of the Labour Party (a young John Smith, later Labour leader, stood in 1961 and ’64, coming a good second in the latter).

The novelist Eric Linklater also stood in the constituency, in 1933, as a nationalist: he got 1083 votes, 3.6% of the total: but more rewardingly used the experience for a comic novel, Magnus Merriman, whose chaotic campaign in somewhere looking like East Fife ends in all but total rejection at the hands of the hard-headed, straight-speaking locals.

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The other was a teacher of English at our school, named Alastair Mackie. He was a poet, writing mostly in Scots, in the tradition of the largest figure in Scots literature in the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid — one who gave his hobby in Who’s Who as “Anglophobia”, and in his verse, articles and interviews missed no opportunity to express his detestation of the southern neighbours.

I think Mackie was better: none of MacDiarmid’s straining to use his art to push Scots into a hatred of the English, nor his artificial dialect, culled from every region of the country, which no-one spoke and Scots speakers needed a dictionary to read. He was, though, a private man with a family to support through his teaching: his poems were published in small editions — until, after his death, one of the Shakespeareans close to him, and I, paid for a collected edition of his lucid, memorable work. He, too, had little time for the English: but was too intelligent to let it become an obsession, and much too intelligent to follow MacDiarmid down his love of dictators, Mussolini and Lenin.

The power (and treacheries) of memory slowed me up, took me down half-forgotten or never-trodden paths. It was a youth passed among people unselfconsciously secure of their Scottishness, sarcastic about the English (often presented as posh and snobbish) — but also uncontroversially British, and still, even after empire and the might of the Clyde, at times proud of being so.

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: the Great Mistake of Scottish Independence is published by Polity in April.